Along with the development of communication infrastructures and progress of information communication technologies, information services using the Internet are available.
As one of such information services, an image browse service which keeps user's image data in a storage area of a server on the Internet by an image service site (to be referred to as a photo site hereinafter), and publishes the image data at a desired timing of the user is known.
Since a compact apparatus such as a mobile phone terminal has a small display unit, the information size that the terminal can display is limited. Also, the information size that can be transmitted via a mobile phone communication is limited by a communication provider. For this reason, when an image with a large information size is to be published to a mobile phone terminal, the mobile phone terminal cannot often display or receive image data, and no data can often be displayed on the display of the mobile phone terminal.
In an image browse service, since image information is managed for each image browse request from the user, the size of management data of user information, image information, and the like becomes huge as the number of users and the number of images increase, and user and image search processes and their information processes take much time.